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Startups in 13 Sentences

paulgraham.com

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Re: Startups in 13 Sentences

#31

Post by tlb »

patio11 wrote: post #23
rokhayakebe wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although I agree with your comment, I must say that everyone (and I mean everyone), who is a startup entrepreneur, knows about HN, and reads all PGs essays knows that these are advices, opinions based on the experience from funding over 100 startups. Not rules, advices. And although I applaud your efforts and accomplishments at Tarsnap, I must say that you base your argument on significantly less than 100 startups.

And although I applaud your efforts and accomplishments at Tarsnap, I must say that you base your argument on significantly less than 100 startups. I don't believe this sort of comment is helpful. For one thing, "X works" and "Y can work, too" are not two bits of advice which are in opposition to each other, and shouldn't be treated as such. (Even when X = "Startups should have multiple founders" and Y = "Actually, y…

That made me curious. McDonalds sells about 50M cups of coffee / day. Some startups who I know participate on HN are (multiplying Alexa daily reach by 1G, to get order of magnitude estimates):

  Scribd: 5M daily uniques

  Justin.tv: 3M daily uniques

  last.fm: 2M daily uniques
Just those would equal McD's daily coffee sales in 5 days. So we're not so many orders of magnitude behind big public companies.

It might be satisfying to include some reference lines on your daily user graph, so you can celebrate when you serve more pages than, say, McDonald's sells fish sandwiches, or Wal-Mart sells Spiderman action figures, or whatever.

Re: Startups in 13 Sentences

#32

Post by nostrademons »

cperciva wrote: post #28
nostrademons wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We followed 4 of these (3, 7, 8, 13) and broke 7 (1, 2, 5, 9, 10, 11, 12) and ultimately failed. The interesting part is that right up until failure, we had checkmarks besides #1, 11, and 12, making 7 yes and 4 no, and then they rapidly fell into the opposite column. It's amazing how quickly they can change. Those 3 are also quite related - while I still had cofounders, we'd kinda prop each other up during the low po…

the emotional burden was far too much. I couldn't do [a startup without cofounders] - if you can, good for you, but I think that there's a lot of truth in these rules. I think it would be very interesting to chart the success rates of sole-founder startups vs. whether or not the founder had a graduate degree: I get the feeling that the sort of struggles single founders often go through are very similar to the sort of…

That's actually almost exactly the same thing my former boss said (he has a Ph.D).

I think there's a lot of truth to it, but it can also be misleading. A lot of these solo-Ph.D startups just chug along for years at ramen or small-business profitability levels. They work, they provide a nice living for the founder and a few employees, but they don't grow. Whether or not they survive seems to depend on how independent-minded the founders are, because the financial returns are often less than the founders can get elsewhere. Anyone with a Ph.D that has the work ethic to run a startup ought to be worth at least a couple hundred grand a year in industry.

There're a lot of other benefits to having multiple founders besides the "don't give up" aspect. Ideas tend to become better when they're bounced off multiple people, since the dumb parts of the idea get weeded out and the clever parts get amplified. Other people tend to take you more seriously when you can say "we" instead of "I". You learn how to compromise and accept other's input early, which is absolutely crucial once you have employees. You get a stronger company culture, which always seems to evolve out of the interactions between founders.

Actually, you seem a lot like my old boss - both math Ph.Ds with an independent streak, except you're half his age. He was a good guy and very, very smart (finished a Princeton Ph.D in 3 years). But the startup I worked at for 2 years, which is now 8 years old, is still limping along and hasn't taken off. And I really think that if it'd had 2-3 equal founders instead of 1 majority and 2 minority founders, it would've done much, much better.

Re: Startups in 13 Sentences

#33

Post by nostrademons »

tlb wrote: post #31
patio11 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And although I applaud your efforts and accomplishments at Tarsnap, I must say that you base your argument on significantly less than 100 startups. I don't believe this sort of comment is helpful. For one thing, "X works" and "Y can work, too" are not two bits of advice which are in opposition to each other, and shouldn't be treated as such. (Even when X = "Startups should have multiple founders" and Y = "Actually, y…

That made me curious. McDonalds sells about 50M cups of coffee / day. Some startups who I know participate on HN are (multiplying Alexa daily reach by 1G, to get order of magnitude estimates): Scribd: 5M daily uniques Justin.tv: 3M daily uniques last.fm: 2M daily uniques Just those would equal McD's daily coffee sales in 5 days. So we're not so many orders of magnitude behind big public companies. It might be satisfy…

I'm guessing he wasn't counting a page impression as a customer. The actual number of customers of Scribd, Justin.tv, and last.fm is quite a bit less than the number of customers of McDonalds. It may be just a handful, if they contract out to an ad provider and then get all their revenue through that.

Of course, this is a meaningless comparison, because the number of people that Scribd or Justin.TV reach on a daily basis is more closely correlated to the number of users they have than the number of customers.

Re: Startups in 13 Sentences

#34

Post by DenisM »

I like this taxonomy, almost "the startup testaments". :) To turn this into a work of classics one needs to add a bit of detail to each of 13 sentences (from all the material that is already out there):

a short essay

three anecdotes illustrating the point

one anecdote providing a counter-example (to provide context and also remind readers about fallability of generic rules)

a short list of literature (e.g. pointers to specific chapter of "founder@work", "4 steps to the epiphany etc")

For each aspiring hacker this could easily replace days worth of reading of assorted stuff out there, just trying to get up to speed. In turn, more hackers will jump in.

Re: Startups in 13 Sentences

#35

Post by cperciva »

nostrademons wrote: post #32
cperciva wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the emotional burden was far too much. I couldn't do [a startup without cofounders] - if you can, good for you, but I think that there's a lot of truth in these rules. I think it would be very interesting to chart the success rates of sole-founder startups vs. whether or not the founder had a graduate degree: I get the feeling that the sort of struggles single founders often go through are very similar to the sort of…

That's actually almost exactly the same thing my former boss said (he has a Ph.D). I think there's a lot of truth to it, but it can also be misleading. A lot of these solo-Ph.D startups just chug along for years at ramen or small-business profitability levels. They work, they provide a nice living for the founder and a few employees, but they don't grow . Whether or not they survive seems to depend on how independent…

Anyone with a Ph.D that has the work ethic to run a startup ought to be worth at least a couple hundred grand a year in industry.

Ah, but that requires a completely different work ethic. To an academic, living on ramen while solving interesting problems is far more interesting than getting rich.

Ideas tend to become better when they're bounced off multiple people

That's what users are for. :-)

Re: Startups in 13 Sentences

#36

Post by prakash »

cperciva wrote: post #29
mechanical_fish wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't think of anyone who would be interested in joining me who wouldn't dramatically lower the average founder quality. Quality is a vector, not a scalar. What's the average of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak? I don't think that's a meaningful question. But the vector sum of their skills was a startup with amazing technical and artistic skill, product focus, business aspirations, charisma, and salesmanship. And I'…

Why isn't this information on the tarsnap homepage Because the tarsnap web site sucks. (Hey, you did ask!) Until very recently the vast majority of people interested in tarsnap were people who knew who I was, had seen my work on FreeBSD, and read my blog -- so putting information about tarsnap onto my blog was only natural. Now tarsnap is starting to gain recognition as something beyond "that thing which Colin is doi…

maybe you don't need a co-founder but at least a contractor/employee to take care of this and all the other things you might not have had the time to take care of?

Re: Startups in 13 Sentences

#37

Post by cperciva »

prakash wrote: post #36
cperciva wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn't this information on the tarsnap homepage Because the tarsnap web site sucks. (Hey, you did ask!) Until very recently the vast majority of people interested in tarsnap were people who knew who I was, had seen my work on FreeBSD, and read my blog -- so putting information about tarsnap onto my blog was only natural. Now tarsnap is starting to gain recognition as something beyond "that thing which Colin is doi…

maybe you don't need a co-founder but at least a contractor/employee to take care of this and all the other things you might not have had the time to take care of?

Quite possibly. If I was going to hire one person to do some contract work, I'm pretty sure that it would be a web designer.

Most likely I'll do this myself, though -- even aside from the issue of money, I find that doing tedious things like web design myself (a) is a useful learning experience, and (b) allows me to think about issues a bit more clearly.

Re: Startups in 13 Sentences

#38

Post by nostrademons »

cperciva wrote: post #35
nostrademons wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually almost exactly the same thing my former boss said (he has a Ph.D). I think there's a lot of truth to it, but it can also be misleading. A lot of these solo-Ph.D startups just chug along for years at ramen or small-business profitability levels. They work, they provide a nice living for the founder and a few employees, but they don't grow . Whether or not they survive seems to depend on how independent…

Anyone with a Ph.D that has the work ethic to run a startup ought to be worth at least a couple hundred grand a year in industry. Ah, but that requires a completely different work ethic. To an academic, living on ramen while solving interesting problems is far more interesting than getting rich. Ideas tend to become better when they're bounced off multiple people That's what users are for. :-)

To an academic, living on ramen while solving interesting problems is far more interesting than getting rich.

But if that's your goal, then likely that will be what your startup gets. Interesting problems, few customers, and not much money.

There're lots of Ph.D-founded startups in that category. My previous employer was one. Symbolics is another high-profile example. Lots we haven't heard of, since they're working on interesting problems and not getting rich.

If that's what you want, go for it, as long as you're bootstrapping (it's irresponsible to take other people's money when you have no intention of making some yourself). Just be honest with yourself and any future employees about it. I'm still a bit bitter that I was sold on visions of Bloomberg and revolutionizing the financial industry while the reality was more about working on the boring parts of problems that were interesting to my boss and only vaguely interesting to customers.

Re: Startups in 13 Sentences

#39

Post by cperciva »

nostrademons wrote: post #38
cperciva wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone with a Ph.D that has the work ethic to run a startup ought to be worth at least a couple hundred grand a year in industry. Ah, but that requires a completely different work ethic. To an academic, living on ramen while solving interesting problems is far more interesting than getting rich. Ideas tend to become better when they're bounced off multiple people That's what users are for. :-)

To an academic, living on ramen while solving interesting problems is far more interesting than getting rich. But if that's your goal, then likely that will be what your startup gets. Interesting problems, few customers, and not much money. There're lots of Ph.D-founded startups in that category. My previous employer was one. Symbolics is another high-profile example. Lots we haven't heard of, since they're working o…

Oh, my goal isn't to live on ramen. I gave that example simply to illustrate that the work ethic involved in running a startup is not quite the same as the work ethic involved in working for a big company.

Re: Startups in 13 Sentences

#40

Post by patio11 »

tlb wrote: post #31
patio11 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And although I applaud your efforts and accomplishments at Tarsnap, I must say that you base your argument on significantly less than 100 startups. I don't believe this sort of comment is helpful. For one thing, "X works" and "Y can work, too" are not two bits of advice which are in opposition to each other, and shouldn't be treated as such. (Even when X = "Startups should have multiple founders" and Y = "Actually, y…

That made me curious. McDonalds sells about 50M cups of coffee / day. Some startups who I know participate on HN are (multiplying Alexa daily reach by 1G, to get order of magnitude estimates): Scribd: 5M daily uniques Justin.tv: 3M daily uniques last.fm: 2M daily uniques Just those would equal McD's daily coffee sales in 5 days. So we're not so many orders of magnitude behind big public companies. It might be satisfy…

I'm terminally old-fashioned in a lot of ways. I hold open doors for ladies, take off my hat before entering buildings, and define customer as "someone who pays money for a good or service".
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